transformation - Agile and Scrum Blog

Sell Agile to Customers

People often ask me how to sell an agile way of working to their customers. To the customers who are used to the traditional way of working, customers who are used to requirements and fix scope, fix time, and fix budget, and customers who are used to big upfront analysis.

Don’t expect any magic. Selling is simple. All you need to do is to show the value. Show them what it is in for them. Because if they don’t understand what kind of value they are getting with this new way of working, all they have is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of change. Always start with why. No change will happen unless you create a sense of urgency.

The value they get will differ depending on the situation and their experience, so my best selling pitch always starts with questions. What would you say about your current experience? What are the typical pains? What is going well? What is important for you? I try to be open to new perspectives and curious about their situation. Then based on what they say I try to offer a new way of working. “We do *something differently* so that *this* and *this* will not happen.” The closer you get to their language, the better. Typically, you need to address lack of transparency, misunderstanding of the customer needs, not keeping the budget, and/or quality issues. They also often ask for a reference, so be ready to give one.

The most important is that you can only sell things you truly believe in. It’s good to already have some experience not only for a reference but also for your self-confidence. It’s always visible from your body language if you don’t believe in it. Plus, it’s hard to answer their curious questions about the details of your work if you never experienced it.

How to Start Good Agile

People always ask how to start, what are the practices we need to do, what is the magic. They are looking for a cookbook, something to copy step by step. And they are often disappointed that I refrain from recommending them where to see the ideal example. Look what good or bad copying Spotify way of working brought to the industry. So if not copy what someone else did, how shall we start?

First step of every change is to create a sense of urgency. If you don’t have it, you won’t change. Ever. Because we are fine, we are good enough. We always did it this way. So to break a habit, you need to find a strong reason why keeping your habits is not a way forward. Only then you can start moving.

Why do we have to change?
What happen if we don’t?

Often, we see reasons why the change is inevitable. But ask yourself, hat about the others? Do they feel the same way? Communication is the key here. Communicate over and over again. Why are we doing it. The higher the urgency the higher the chance of success.

Second phase is start experimenting. Start small. No big changes. Note we are not looking for perfection, we look for good enough and inspect and adapt form there. One team after another. Learn from mistakes, develop the habit of continuous improvement. Implement the Kizen mindset. You can run the whole transformation in Scrum, iterating is Sprints, learning from retrospectives, getting feedback in Reviews, creating a Backlog with organizational impediments, and through that process inspect and adapt. Very agile, and very simple as well.

And how do you know it’s working? In general, when I go to organizations, I check two things:

Do they work as individuals, or as a team.
Are they delivering work, or end-to-end business value.

Individuals distribute work, deliver it and then try to merge it together. There is my work and your work. They don’t need each other much. It’s the world of work distribution, allocation, and individual responsibility. Team on the contrary are collaborating to achieve a goal. They don’t have roles; they do whatever it takes to achieve the common goal. Teams often leverage the pair work, swarming or mobbing. They learn, help each other. They are more creative and innovative and therefore more effective in solving complex problems.

The traditional world was full of managing dependencies. The skill-oriented departments were not value oriented but optimizing for individual performance. And don’t take me wrong, it totally made sense as the majority of their problems were just complicated, far from being unpredictable and complex. In the world where we know what needs to be done, the whole difficulty is how to plan and deliver it exactly according to the plan. The complexity and unpredictability of the nowadays business environment changed that. We realized we don’t know what needs to be done and all we can do is to inspect and adapt. Find a way how to achieve the business goals. Learn from feedback the sooner the better.

Both points are fundamentally changing the way we work. Both are necessary for agile to be successful. So, you can do a simple assessment 0-10. What is the quality of our collaboration, are we working as individuals, or self-managing, cross-functional, dedicated team? Are we output, skills, and effort oriented or are we outcome driven delivering end-to-end customer value? Just two scales to reflect. Agile is simple, right?

Challenge the Status Quo

Over the years, I was hoping that if we, agile coaches and trainers do our job well, we can multiply the success we experienced. I was part of the early adopters’ wave of agility. We were open to trying new things, experimenting with different ways of working, trying one step at a time, and inspecting and adapting along the way. And it worked. I experienced the new energy, better outcomes, happier customers, and more successful products.

Later I leveraged that experience, became an agile coach, and started helping various organizations with their agile transformation. I was able to smooth their journey and help them to avoid some mistakes we made when we started. Then early majority came, it felt harder, but also good because they were able to pivot and get better. They were genuinely trying to change. It might have looked difficult at the beginning, it was definitely not a straightforward journey, but it worked as they developed the continuous change and improvement muscle. After a while, it was not that hard to help those organizations to shift. They were open to change and therefore successful.

When the late majority hit, it brought those tough environments where people apply various scaling frameworks, trying to find a recipe, looking for shortcuts. They wanted to be done with it quickly and go back to normal. They were often not willing to stop and rethink how they wanted to progress. That’s the golden era of consultancy companies, with their big bang agile transformations. The satisfaction with a change was not always great, as to achieve something they needed to go through several waves of agile transformations, trying to get out of the habits, complicated project structures, hierarchy, and irrelevant metrics. As they were often repeating the same mistakes over and over again, success was not that easy to get. But eventually, they realize that agile is not another process and reconnect to the mindset.

Now, I start seeing some of the laggards and it makes me wonder why they feel a need to pretend they want to change because their constraints are often so fixed that it simply won’t work. Implementing agile without changing the way you work will only create pain and no meaningful outcomes. And yet I do the same as I always did. Try to find enthusiastic individuals, who are ready to start challenging the status quo. For the rest, I put a seed in their minds. It will grow eventually. Maybe they can’t do much about it now, but in some time, they remember it and go for a different way of working.

Success is not about practices, it’s not about tools, it’s about the ability to challenge the status quo and change the way you work. Let’s together transform the world of work.

Agile Journey

Agile is a journey. In the beginning, people think it’s about different tools, new processes, new names. They keep comparing it to what they know and they are frustrated that the new way of working doesn’t fit the world they know. They still try to analyze, plan, estimate, and track delivery. The problem with that is that they are changing to agile not because there is a new improved method, but because their current way of working is not as successful as it used to be. There is a strong need for significant change. The traditional way of working was effective in solving predictable problems, not in dealing with complexity. In the current world, organizations need to be more flexible, innovative, and creative to address VUCA challenges. Agile brings new paradigms, a new mindset, a new way of working. It’s not comparable anyhow to the traditional ways of managing and delivering work.

Once they pass the initial phase, stop comparing and start looking for understanding, people often fall into a trap of taking all agile as a ‘religion’. Just follow the process, implement tools, do scrum according to the Scrum Guide! This phase is not much fun either. But they are on a journey, not fighting with any strong resistance anymore, and deepening their knowledge about various practices. People are interested, they want to understand it, do it well, however they are usually asking fundamentally wrong questions, looking for the best practices, believing they can copy & paste practices.

When they experiment, fail, and learn from failures enough, they start realizing the real agility, which is not in practices and tools, but in a different culture, mindset, and approach to things. They start realizing the organization and leadership need to change in order to finish the transformation and allow the agility to be successful. Agile becomes the way you not only organize the work but the way you live. It will bring different values and different perspectives.

Top virtual conferences to join in 2020

The world recently changed into a very unpredictable stage. No one expected it, no one was ready for it, and not many people like it either. However, every crisis is good for something, and this one brought new ways of doing things. While most of the traditional conferences from my recommendation from January are canceled or postponed, the new virtual events emerged from the crises and bring unique value in this difficult time. The first time ever there can be one event for everyone in any place in the world – no travel, no jetlag. If some talks are late at night or too early in the morning for you, don’t worry. There is going to be recording. And just be honest, how many of you attended all sessions at the face to face event? I didn’t. So there is no difference really 🙂

#1: Agile100

Agile100 is a series of virtual conferences that bring the world’s top 100 agile thinkers and speakers to everyone across the globe. Embracing the latest technology, the conference is not only streaming talks from great speakers but creates connections, allows participants to meet and learn from each other, offer parallel ad-hoc open-space sessions, learn from experienced Certified Agile Coaches, and much more. People with access to knowledge and information can tackle any challenge and make our world more productive, more humane, and more sustainable.

LEARN – CONNECT – GET INSPIRED

The first few dates in the 2020 series are May 29, June 26, and July 31 – 12pm – 10pm (CET – Central European Time) / 6am – 4pm (ET – Eastern Time).

#2: Emerging from the crisis

Business Agility Institute is known for the top-quality conferences across the globe. Their last face to face event in the NYC had to turn half into virtual to accommodate people with travel restriction and they did amazing job allowing online participants to join and collaborate in facilitated deep dives the same way as the face to face attendees could. The current crisis will leave an indelible mark on the world of business. What will be the impact on Leadership, HR, Strategy, Finance & Risk Management? And what role does business agility play in emerging from this crisis? This conference is not about what we need to do now to survive the crisis or adapt to remote work; we’re aiming higher. We want to learn what we need to do today in order to thrive tomorrow. Join Emerging from crisis virtual conference to be inspired through 20-minute talks and discover practical next steps through facilitated dialog with your peers, get inspiration from invited leaders and strategists who walked through crises and have come out the other side with lessons learned and best practices.

LEARN FROM THE PAST TO THRIVE IN THE FUTURE

June 17th – 19th, 2020 – two options to choose:

Option 1: 11am – 1:30pm (US Eastern Time) / 5pm – 7:30pm (CET – Central European Time)
Option 1: 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm (US Eastern Time) / 8am – 10:30am (Sydney time)

#3: LeSS Day Europe

LeSS Day Europe virtual conference takes upon a mission of bringing to you fresh, impressive and up-to-date case studies of Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) adoptions by means of story-telling and rich knowledge exchange. Get inspired by the most recent and most insightful case studies involving hundreds of people transformation in different industries. As usually, this conference is worth joining.

LEARN FROM PROVEN CASE-STUDIES AND FIRST-HAND STORIES OF DEEP AGILE TRANSFORMATIONS

June 15 – 17, 2020 – 3pm – 7pm (CET – Central European Time) / 10am – 14pm (US Eastern Time)

From Good to Great: Radical Transparency

I started the series From Good to Great by advising you to find your own way of being Agile. The next blog focuses on radical transparency. Let’s be truthful for a moment, how many organizations you worked for have real transparency, and how many are hiding information behind the teams or department walls, encourage by processes and claimed necessity of being compliant. Lack of transparency is a strong weapon which eventually can kill any Agile transformation as it makes collaboration and self-organization almost impossible. Lack of transparency is a great friend of hierarchical structures supported by fear and politics. “If I’m the only one who has the information, no one can jeopardize my position, and I’m safe being manager… All I need to do to be promoted is wait and make sure that no big mistake happens.” Sound familiar?

Once you really mean it with your Agile journey, radical transparency is the key enabler. Together with the empowerment raising from the self-organization, it brings the energy and people start to take over the responsibility and ownership. They don’t wait until someone promote them to any function, they don’t wait for any orders. They take it over and collaborate on the solution.

Radical transparency is the key enabler of agility

Understand the Purpose

To understand the organizational vision and have a clear evolutionary purpose is crucial to successful collaboration and self-organization. In order to take over any initiative, people have to understand where are we heading, who are we, and who we don’t want to be. There is a very simple test. All you need to do is to take a random employee and ask him/her what is the vision/purpose/uniqueness of this organization. For simplicity, you can start with the executive leadership team to see if they didn’t lose the track of why they are there. 🙂 The good news is they usually know exactly what is the vision and can explain it in a very clear and engaging way. But when you do a cross-check across the organization, very likely there is a disconnect (usually several or even too many) which results in a very disruptive chaotic way of working. To fix it, storytelling is your best friend. Nothing can set up the stage better. Using serious of collaborative workshops like worldcafe, openspace, etc. involve people in co-creating the vision and help them to be part of it. Storytelling will set the directions. They need to own it, they need to believe it, they need to feel a need to be part of it. That’s the energy you need to begin. It brings innovative thinking, creativity, and empowerment, when people start offering help, ideas, and are ready to sacrifice personal goals in exchange for being part of something bigger.

Experiment, Inspect, Adapt

The next step is run experiments. At every level, you need to be transparent and openly share experiments at the early stage, and last but not least be ready to adapt through feedback. The downside is that before you learn how to collaborate and pass a test that you have the same understanding of the vision, it’s going to be very inefficient, and frustrating. “If we can just do it our way”, “they don’t understand it”, and “we know what to do so why shall we ask for feedback” people often say. But if you are strong enough and sustain the need for shortcut pre-baked solutions, very soon you see the results in higher collaboration, better understanding and some kind of harmony, which all over results in a high-performing environment.

Together with that, you need to run regular retrospectives and be transparent about the action steps. Share the backlog internally and externally. Simply there is no or very few information which needs to be hidden. If you believe you find any, try to double-check it by playing the “Five Why” and make sure you have a plan on what needs to be done so you can make it fully transparent.

Be Inclusive

The last necessary step on the radical transparency journey is to be inclusive. There is no such thing as a closed meeting. They shall be publicly visible with an open invitation so people can join if they are interested and have something to say. If there are many people, the facilitator can use some diverge and merge facilitation techniques, but no restriction shall be applied for the sake of efficiency.

It’s not about being fast without alignment, it’s about building alignment so you can be even faster.

Radical transparency is hard. You first need to have the courage to say things how they are, don’t be afraid to hear difficult feedback, have trust people will help you, and be ready to help others because after all, you all have the same vision, the same evolutionary purpose to achieve. It’s not easy but is a great investment and it will pay back in forming a highly adaptive (agile) high-performing organizations – the organizations which are formed to crack the challenges of the nowadays complex world.

From Good to Great: Don’t Copy, Find Your Own Way

Agile become part of our lives and you can see some sort of “Agile” in every other company, but still, many companies are failing to be Agile and understand the mindset. Ron Jeffries talks about “Dark Scrum” for years and I see more and more frustrated people around than ever. So why are the companies failing?

The most appealing way how to fail is to copy someone. When it worked somewhere else, why shall we take a hard time trying to invent it ourselves when we can just apply it. It usually starts with a big push from the top and has often wrong expectation from such a change. Being Agile is going to be hard, you might not see the results right away, and renaming a few roles and departments would not be enough.

Instead, you need to start from the bottom, get the experience from the teams, learn on the way through your own failures, do experiments, have the courage to do things differently. At some time, when you got used to this way of working at the team level and can imagine what needs to change in the business, systems architecture, culture, and organizational design, you might need to get ready to the next step – scaling.

Which to tell you the truth shall be called ‘descaling’ instead as in order to work, you need to turn the organization around and build it around the cross-functional teams who can actually deliver value end to end. Be business value driven, customer-centric. Hold on, yes, you need to understand what the business value actually is and think about the organizational purpose which is matching that value at the same time. Why are you here as an organization, and what would happen if you disappear from the market tomorrow? Would someone miss you? Are your employees living that purpose?

Having the evolutionary purpose is an enabler for Agile culture to finally settle down and stick. Only then, when you have a higher purpose, you can talk about truly being Agile and forming the Agile organization. How many ideal organizations I’ve seen? None. How many companies I’ve seen, being on this Agile journey? Hopefully enough to demonstrate that we can make it. Give us the light at the end of the tunnel that we can actually turn the organization around and make it a better place to be. Make work fun again. It’s not about being ideal, Agile is about inspecting and adapting, learning from experiments, learning from failures. So instead of looking for some ideal organizations to copy, how about if we start with ourselves, get the courage to do things differently. Be brave. Be Agile.

Deadlines in Scrum

One of the topics most of the project managers and traditional organizations at the beginning of their Agile transformation journey are struggling are deadlines. How can we do Scrum and commit ourselves to the date when we don’t know the scope? Let’s make this clear. Scrum is purpose driven, not functionality driven. What does that mean? It’s not about delivery, it’s about achieving the certain outcome. And that’s a game changer. Instead of fixing the whole scope at the beginning, we spend the time to understand the purpose. Form a vision. What do we want to achieve? For whom? Where is the value? How are we going to change the world once it’s done? What makes it different?

Once you have enough mutual understanding of the business value and the vision, you are ready to continue. So, we agreed that in long-term, you need to achieve this, what about mid-term? What is the most important to achieve now? Where is the biggest risk we need to mitigate by feedback? What impact do we need to get? Once you have this release agreed, you are ready to start Sprints. Again, Sprint is not about precise functionality delivery, but achieving certain impact, deliver value and learn from that. Therefore, there is a Sprint Goal – a small vision for a Sprint, answering a question what do we need to achieve in the short-term.

Finally, none of those deliveries can actually fail. Of course, you can learn that your business idea was wrong or the value was not where you would expect it. That’s why we use Scrum, to test our hypothesis. But the nice thing is, that neither Sprint nor release can actually fail the delivery if you prioritize well because 80% business value is hidden it 20% of the functionality. If you prioritize the value, you always achieve the goals.

So next time when your customer ask when it’s going to be done, you can invite him in the conversation about the value, vision, release charters, and Sprint Goals. Don’t ask what they want, ask what they need and why. Only then you are both going to be successful with Agile.

Using tribes, squads, and gilds is not Agile by itself

Many Czech corporations are now starting their Agile journey, at least they say so. Despite fancy labels, they don’t have any desire to change so, unfortunately, you can only expect some ‘fake Agile & Scrum’ and no real outcomes nor fun. How do you recognize them? Most of them got inspired by so-called “Spotify model” (which was never supposed to be any model to follow anyway) or got it second-hand from Dutch ING. Both were just a case-studies how they work at the given time. Both case-studies have one thing in common – both organizations went through a significant change in their values, approaches, and culture. Those who only follow what they shared usually don’t get such a culture and don’t pay any attention to the mindset change either. Just re-structure departments to tribes, squads, and guilds, it’s cool, so it must be the right Agile. But unfortunately using cool labels is not enough to be successful so such organizations who blindly followed what the others wrote about in the case-studies are failing miserably in a few months.

One example from a huge corporation who applied ‘Spotify model’ – after a year of implementing it, they end up in such a mess that they had to throw away a year of the development and start from scratch again. Quite painful. And expensive. They faced the same issues as the most of such corporations. Not enough of collaboration, culture, and mindset. After all, they didn’t really want any change. They just want to mark it ‘done’. We implemented Agile, we are cool. The similar business model like SAFe (apply new process and terminology, you don’t have to change the mindset or your way of working), just in this case we don’t use any ‘trains’ which if you thought about it are out of fashion for years now, but a modern terminology of tribes, squads and guilds. Nonetheless, the result is similar. Unfortunately. One huge American corporation recently started their 13^thAgile transformation. How fascinating. The rumors say that this time they are going to make it. It seems they finally understand that Agile transformation is a journey. It’s not about new terminology, it’s not about tools, practices or processes. It’s a different way of working, a different mindset. So even if it looks like a disaster right now, don’t cry :)… another five attempts and you make it as well. You just need to be patient and wait for the right moment. After all, it’s not that hard. Just stop pretending the change is not needed, and start the real transformation. Change your mindset. Change the way you work.

Any change starts small, with a sense of urgency. Only when you have a strong enough strategic reason, you will change. Remember that Agile is not your goal, it’s only the best way how to achieve your goals in the nowadays constantly changing complex world.

Is Agile for us?

It seems to be a very common question. In general, if you are willing to change yourself, yes. There is no bigger enemy than yourself. There is no environment, size or business restrictions. Any company can change if they find a strong enough reason for a change. However, there are few questions which can help you to identify if you are ready or not.

Agile is not for us if…

We are looking for “magic” that helps us deliver everything faster.
We want to allocate individuals on tasks based on their specialization.
We focus on a buyer-supplier relationship and customer acceptance.
We focus on specification, requirements, and change requests.
We optimize for local efficiency (individuals, component, technology).
We just want to be “modern” and copy some terminology (tribes, squads, etc.).

Agile is for us if…

We are ready to build real self-organizing stable teams.
We are ready to form real cross-functional teams.
We are ready to build a partnership with customers and looking for feedback.
We are ready to focus on fast value delivery in a working product.
We are ready to optimize for adaptiveness, flexibility and change responsiveness.
We are ready to change our way of working to achieve some strategic goals and sustain the current complex world.

The first list is grounded in a misunderstanding of what the Agile and Scrum is about and leads to “Dark Scrum”. The second implies a significant change of your approach, values, the way of work, simply the change of mindset. It’s up to you 🙂